Tony’s a Renaissance
man.
When you think about
Hartnellian pure historical stories, there are two distinct trends that come to
mind. There’s the fairly po-faced, educational, intriguing stories that throw
the Tardis team in to increasingly complex situations and challenge them mostly
with the business of staying alive long enough to get back to the Tardis and
let history ignore them as much as possible. Annnnnd then there’s Dennis
Spooner and Donald Cotton, who treated history as an enormous gag-reel, albeit
one with plenty of realistic peril along the way. From The Myth Makers, where
the Doctor gives the Greeks the idea for the Trojan Horse, to The Romans, which
is basically one long Benny Hill runaround with a slavering Nero, and the
Doctor (yes, the same Doctor who said in the more po-faced Aztecs that time
travellers couldn’t re-write a single line of history) gives the demented
mother-murderer the idea to burn Rome to the ground, to The Gunfighters, in
which the Tardis team go in search of a dentist, get mixed up in the gunfight
at the OK Corral, and yet no one thinks to shoot whoever wrote the Ballad of
the Last Chance Saloon stone dead, Spooner and Cotton gave the show a different
way to do the pure historical.
Niccolo Machiavelli.
That’s a name.
It’s a twinkling,
quick-eyed, computer-brained by-word for convoluted, spiral-spined plotting and
chicanery. The man gave his name to a particular brand of two, three and
four-faced deception in the pursuit of a given goal.
In a way, that’s
justifiable – his most famous book, The Prince, is actually nothing but a set
of political logic-gates, imagining various scenarios one after the other and
explaining how, if you are Prince A, with Objective B in any of those
situations, you can reach it. What it absolutely doesn’t do is scruple about
the niceties of what might be considered good behaviour. If Objective B is most
easily achieved by slaughtering Persons C, D, E and F, that’s what The Prince
advises you to do. Seriously, it could have been written by a computer (note to
self for future fan audio story).
Clearly then, Niccolo
Machiavelli is a character reaching out from history and simply begging
to be at the centre of a Doctor Who story. He could work in either of
the two purely historical ways – you could make him big and dark and deeply
dangerous…or you could stick rather more closely to historical fact and make
him a pretty tangential figure, infuriated at his house arrest and scheming to
find a way back into favour with the big cheeses of Italian politics. That
leads you down the Spooner-Cotton pathway of history as fun.
All of which is a suitably
convoluted and Machiavellian way of saying that Ravelli Conspiracy writers
Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky have done a Spooner-Cotton – and it works
faaaaaabulously.
Renaissance Italian
politics has found a new fan-base recently thanks to series like The Borgias.
This is very much Big Finish Does The Medicis (a rival family of big cheeses),
giving us lots of rich atmosphere, stinky peasants, revolutionary kitchen
maids, and a simmering quarrel between two of the Medici Boys – Guillamo (Jamie
Ballard), the bloodthirsty, carnage-hungry, paranoid ruler of Florence, and his
brother Giovanni, better known to history as Pope Leo X (Robert Hands),
(incredibly vain, incredibly rich man buys his way to most powerful position in
the world…ha. Who’d have thought it…?), who finds his brother’s warlike
attitude an awful distraction from the cartloads of peacock breasts he could be
chomping through and the fine fabrics he could be wearing, and – ahem – the
altar boys he could be ravishing.
In the middle of these two
bickering rich boys, you have Machiavelli, played by the claret-and-shot-silk-voiced
Mark Frost, under house arrest for his sympathies to the previous regime,
striving assiduously to get out from under and win the favour of one or both of
the Medicis.
And then, just for added
fun, you bring in the First Doctor, Steven Taylor and Vicki, to spin the action
of plots, counter-plots, counter-counter-plots, sub-plots and
counter-sub-plots. To cut a long but fast moving story short, what you have is
somewhere between English drawing-room farce and genuine Italian renaissance
comedy (you may not have a vicar in his vestments, but you do have a Pope in
his pomposities). There’s perhaps not quite enough cross dressing or blatant
vulgarity for either form of theatrical entertainment, though there is plenty
of nudge nudge wink wink humour wrung out of Vicki catching the Pope’s eye as a
companion, if not so much a consort. There are mass poisonings – or are there?
– a bit of dress-up for the Doctor, dungeons, dungeons and…erm…more dungeons
for Steven, and in her trademark way, there’s poncing about the place as the
special friend of the person in charge for Vicki. There’s a scheming scullery
maid in the person of Carla (Olivia Poulet giving a performance positively
brimming with brio – add a bit of thigh-slapping and she could be Principal Boy
in a pantomime). And, borrowing more from Spooner and Cotton’s inheritor,
Douglas Adams, and particularly from City of Death, there’s a Guard Captain of
positively glorious, almost fourth wall-breaking boredom and cheesed-offness,
played by Joe Bor. Honestly, he’s almost Red Dwarfian – when commanded to make
sure the prisoners are kept under lock and key, he raises the
not-inconsiderable point that they’re having quite a bad time recently in the
‘prisoners not escaping’ department. If nothing else were perfect in this audio
story, it’d be worth listening to for Bor’s Guard Captain alone.
Plenty else about this
story’s perfect though – the brotherly one-upmanship between the Medici Boys is
delicately played and distinctively voiced by Hands and Ballard. Maureen
O’Brien too pitches her performance finely, to tease out the comedy in the
script. Frost, in the pivotal role of Machiavelli, is exactly what you hope
Machiavelli would be – slick, smooth, calculating, and ever-revolving, trying
to keep his favour constant, or advance it, depending on the prevailing
political wind, till in the end, neither we, nor anyone else, nor even, it’s
suggested, Machiavelli himself really knows quite whose side he’s on, which is
a fitting tribute to the man who wrote The Prince – the point being of course,
he’s on his own side, and only his own side, always. Lisa
Bowerman, directing, moves the whole thing along with a pace that serves both
the comedy and the drama, so you spin your way through the maze of Italian politics
and find yourself at the end of the story in what seems like barely a handful
of heartbeats. And pity poor Peter Purves, playing the First Doctor, Steven,
and doing half of the narration too. One can only assume the recording of this
story must have been a fairly schizophrenic business for him, but he delivers
every beat you need, every tone that’s there for the taking.
The pure historical in the
first series of Early Adventures, The Doctor’s Tale, was very much one of the
po-faced school of educational adventures, in the grand tradition of The
Aztecs, The Crusades and Marco Polo – and it did everything you’d expect of
such a story. By going the Spooner-Cotton route though, Khan and Salinsky have
delivered above and beyond, by painting Renaissance Italian politics as exactly
slippery, as exactly comical, as exactly treacherous and loose-footed as they
actually were, nailing the character of Machiavelli into Doctor Who legend, and
having tremendous fun into the bargain. The result is a story that feels fast
and funny, but that uses its complications and machinations and laughs to give
a solidly historical glimpse into a dark but glittering period of European
history. Top marks for this one, Big Finish. More from this duo would be warmly
welcomed.
No comments:
Post a Comment